The Journals of Lewis and Clark (Lewis & Clark Expedition) (Paperback)

by Meriwether Lewis (Author), William Clark (Author), Bernard DeVoto (Editor), Stephen E. Ambrose (Foreword) "On the acquisition of Louisiana, in the year 1803, the attention of the Government of the United States was early directed towards exploring and improving..." (more)
Key Phrases: larboard side, grand chief, flew minits, Capt Lewis, Capt Clark, Snake Indians (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In 1803, when the United States purchased Louisiana from France, the great expanse of this new American territory was a blank -- not only on the map but in our knowledge. President Thomas Jefferson keenly understood that the course of the nation's destiny lay westward and that a national "Voyage of Discovery" must be mounted to determine the nature and accessibility of the frontier. He commissioned his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead an intelligence-gathering expedition from the Missouri River to the northern Pacific coast and back. From 1804 to 1806, Lewis, accompanied by co-captain William Clark, the Shoshone guide Sacajawea, and thirty-two men, made the first trek across the Louisiana Purchase, mapping the rivers as he went, tracing the principal waterways to the sea, and establishing the American claim to the territories of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. together the captains kept a journal, a richly detailed record of the flora and fauna they sighted, the Indian tribes they encountered, and the awe-inspiring landscape they traversed, from their base camp near present-day St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River. In keeping this record they made an incomparable contribution to the literature of exploration and the writing of natural history. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, writes Bernard DeVoto, was "the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future. There has never been another so excellent or so influential...It satisfied desire and created desire: the desire of the westering nation."

About the Author
Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a long time professor of history at the University of New Orleans.

Bernard Augustine DeVoto (January 11, 1897 - November 13, 1955) was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.

He was born in Ogden, Utah. He attended the University of Utah for one year, and then transferred to Harvard University, but interrupted his education to serve in World War I. After the war, he graduated in 1920.

He began his career in 1922 as an English instructor at Northwestern University and began to write articles and novels, which often provoked controversy for their liberal viewpoint. Sometimes he used the pseudonyms John August and Cady Hewes. In 1927, DeVoto resigned from Northwestern and moved to Massachusetts with his wife Avis. He began to dedicate himself to serious writing along with part-time instructing at Harvard. He wrote frequent articles for periodicals, with a regular column, "The Easy Chair," in Harper's Magazine from 1935 until his death.

DeVoto became an authority on Mark Twain and served as a curator and editor for Mark Twain's papers. From 1936 to 1938 he lived in New York City, where he was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and then returned to Massachusetts.

In 1936 DeVoto published "Genius is Not Enough," a scathing essay on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, in which he vehemently concluded that Wolfe’s work was “hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners" (Donald, D.H. "Look Homeward" 1987, 376-377). The effect of this essay on Wolfe's self-confidence was perhaps the greatest influence on his cutting ties with Scribners and editor Maxwell Perkins shortly before his death in 1938.[citation needed]

In DeVoto's later years, he gained fame for his popular histories of the West: The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri in 1947 (Pulitzer Prize, 1948), The Course of Empire in 1952 (National Book Award, 1953), and DeVoto's popular abridged edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). From the 1940s he was renowned for his championing of public lands and of conservation of natural resources, and for his pugnacious defense of civil liberties.

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Revised edition (April 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395859964
• ISBN-13: 978-0395859964
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,859 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

142 of 143 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential edition of a timeless classic., July 26, 2000

By	Mike Powers "mkp51" (Boothbay, ME United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

To me, the Lewis and Clark expedition ranks as one of the greatest voyages of discovery in human history. Because of the scientific and geographical discoveries that were made, it stands in significance alongside the travels of Marco Polo, the journeys of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and James Cook, and the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

This one-volume edition of Lewis' and Clark's masterpiece is outstanding in every way. Edited by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955), it allows the reader to gain a fuller understanding of the Lewis and Clark expedition through the words of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark themselves.

Lewis and Clark's expedition begins in 1804, taking the 33-person Corps of Discovery from St. Louis, Missouri to the Pacific Ocean and back again (a distance of over 8,000 miles). Among other things, it results in the initial exploration and mapping of the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest, and the description and classification of over 100 never-before seen species of flora and fauna. In addition, it dispells the myth of a northwest passage to the orient, and opens up the vast central and western regions of the continent to commerce with the United States.

Captain Meriwether Lewis, the commander of the Corps of Discovery, is instructed by President Thomas Jefferson to keep a journal of the daily events, scientific observations, and measurements of latitude and longitude along the way. Both he and his co-commander, Captain (in reality Lieutenant) William Clark follow Jefferson's instructions, although not always faithfully.

Lewis and Clark return from their 30-month long expedition as national heroes. Jefferson expects Lewis to oversee the quick publication of the Journals, but Lewis, for a variety of reasons, disappoints the President. He fails miserably as governor of the Louisiana territory; he suffers from depression and alcoholism. In 1809, he (it is surmised by historians) takes his own life, never having submitted so much as one page of the Journals' manuscript to an editor. After Lewis' suicide, Clark teams with editor Nicholas Biddle and completes a short, narrative version of the Lewis and Clark journals. Published in 1814, it contains none of the scientific data compiled during the expedition. Not until 1904 are the Journals of Lewis and Clark published in their entirety, with all of the explorers' scientific observations included.

Bernard DeVoto begins this volume with a well crafted 60-page introduction that explains the historical background to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Then, DeVoto gets out of the way and allows Lewis, Clark, and, on occasion, other members of the Corps of Discovery, to convey with their own words the drama, excitement and high adventure of this magnificent undertaking. Most of the more routine scientific data has been edited out, leaving behind Lewis and Clark's outstanding descriptions of the expedition's key events. It is not easy to forget Lewis' florid prose, through which he so emotionally and enthusiastically describes his initial sighting of the Great Falls of the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, or his encounters with the Nez Perce' and Blackfoot native tribes. DeVoto does, however, keep in a few of the more famous journal entries dealing with scientific observations. Lewis' descriptions of the wildlife, plants and physical geography along the route of the expedition show him to be a gifted naturalist, perhaps one of the finest in history.

One not of caution: while they are very enjoyable, "The Journals of Lewis and Clark" have a tendency to make for taxing reading. This is because the editor left Lewis' and Clark's grammar and spelling almost completely intact. (Both men had an excellent ability to hold their readers' interest with their colorful and dramatic prose, but they were both atrocious spellers.)

This edition of "The Journals of Lewis and Clark" is highly entertaining and well researched. It's the best and most essential volume for those who do not wish to read the complete multi-volume version of this work. I highly recommend this outstanding book!

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A National Treasure, April 2, 2003

By	"[e-mail]" (Ashburn, VA United States) - See all my reviews

The introduction to this book, written by Stephen Ambrose, states that the Journals of Lewis and Clark are an American treasure. At first this seemed like hyperbole, but while reading the Journals, it became clearer why this statement was made.

For in the Journals the reader sees in the mind's eye the vast prairies, indominitable mountains, wide, powerful rivers, and vast Pacific Ocean as Lewis and Clark saw them. Through the Journals the reader encounters Indian tribes, both friendly and fierce. At other times, the puzzling descriptions of previously unknown species of animals and plants give insight as to what discovery and exploration mean. This is what makes the Journals a national treasure. Reading the Journals gives the contemporary reader a sense of what it was like to look at the American West for the first time. In an era when there are precious few corners of the earth that have not been mapped, the Journals convey reader to a time when exploration was not only commonplace, but a necessity for national survival.

The Journals of Lewis and Clark are not particularly easy to read at times if you are not accustomed to the reading genre of travel diaries. Also, at times, the terse writing style of William Clark made the Journal difficult to "plow" through. Merriweather Lewis' entries were much more readable, but his entries do not appear until after the first quarter or so of this edition.

If you are a person who likes maps, the number of maps is low and and the detail they provide is small. There may be other versions of the Journals out there that provide better maps.

The commentaries provided before certain chapters that summarize the events that the Journals are about to relate are very helpful in understanding the narratives that follow.

For the reader not well versed in the Corps of Discovery, I am not sure if the Journals of Lewis and Clark is the best book to read first when learning about their expedition. Undaunted Courage or another such book might a be better first choice if you want to build a curriculum on Lewis and Clark. Looking back, I would suggest reading the Journals in tandem with such a book, to get a balance between the two styles: historical narrative and diary.

Regardless of how the reader approaches the Journals, either by itself or in conjunction with other works, at some point, the critical reader will consult if not read the Journals of Lewis and Clark for a broader perspective on the secondary histories.

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Historical/Adventure Literature, January 16, 2004

By	KAH "Brit" - See all my reviews

This would be, if I could do it, a two-part review. To the source material itself, the journals, I would award five stars out of five--six out of five, even, spelling errors and all, for it's absolutely superb stuff. I have read a fair bit in the adventure and exploration line of literature, but nothing as good as these journals for conveying what it felt like to be on such an expedition. Often, it is the little detail at the end of a day's entry that works the magic; for example, when you read several dozen times about the mosquitoes and gnats being "verry troublesome," or "exceedingly troublesome," it tells you something. As does Lewis's quiet contentment with a bellyful of fresh meat after a long and weary hike. And, as Stephen Ambrose notes in his moving and evocative foreword to this book, the fact that these are on-the-fly journal entries--not memoirs--means that the reader sees the good and the bad choices, the discovery that went on along the way. You will probably recognize at once, for instance, that not all grizzlies will be as easy to kill as the first one the corps encounters, but they don't know that, and you are there to read of their changing opinion of these bears as they meet more and more of them. So the raw material is first rate.
The second part of my review would be for the editing, and I would give that four stars out of five. DeVoto, for all his erudition, does make something of a nuisance of himself from time to time. In the first place, he was clearly writing for the "Manifest Destiny" camp of historians--an outlook now taken with a few grains of salt. Here he is, for example, commenting on the earliest hostile encounter with an Indian tribe, "Indian bluster immediately collapsed and from then on the terrible Tetons were mere beggars. The moral of the episode was that a new breed of white men had come to the Upper Missouri, one that could not be scared or bullied. The moral was flashed along the Indian underground faster than the expedition traveled. It explains why the captains were received with such solicitous respect by the Arikaras," etc (p.34). So there's a bit of that sort of thing to put up with. Also, for reasons I cannot fathom, DeVoto inserts bridging passages, paraphrases, in certain spots rather than using actual journal entries. One of these is the death and burial of the expedition's one fatality. How did the captains and the other men react to this? I would have liked to know that. There's another such paraphrase covering Sacagawea's incredible meeting with her long-lost brother. What did Lewis and Clark think of that amazing coincidence? We're not told by this book.
All in all, however, this is a magnificent read, and my quibbles above don't detract materially from its enjoyment. If I have one suggestion for anyone looking to read this, however, it would be to view Ken Burns's extraordinary PBS documentary on the expedition first; your library should have it.